It happens to every salesperson sooner or later: The prospect shows plenty of interest and hangs on all the way through the sales process—until something imperceptible changes and the deal goes stone cold. “I don’t know what went wrong,” you think to yourself. “We had a rapport going, and it was clear our product was exactly what they were looking for. The next rational move was to commit, but it’s all over.”
 
Maybe “The Sale That Got Away” becomes the main topic of argument at the next sales team meeting. Maybe it becomes a cautionary tale about that customer—or that salesperson. Maybe you just write it off as “one of those things” and move on. But nobody ever forgets, and one can go mad wondering why.
 
The fact is, there are some things you can control (or at least adapt to) in the modern sales game, but there are some that are forever out of reach. Readers of CRM should be familiar with the former, and they bear repeating. It’s the latter, of course, that are really fascinating, and will feel painfully obvious in hindsight.
 
Read the entire DestinationCRM article.